“... to be more Republican or more dispassionately liberal. But he is wary of the charge (reiterated by Peter Porter in his sharp Sunday Telegraph review of Opened Ground) of ‘fetishising ... the local’, and cautious about the indigenous traditions of Irish nationalism, given the evidence that ‘pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... streets of the capital and triggered the violence of the June Days.The Düsseldorf artist Johann Peter Hasenclever captured such a moment in Workers before the City Council. Painted in 1849 and widely exhibited in a number of versions, it shows a delegation of labourers whose work-creation scheme – excavation work on the various arms of the Rhine – had ...”

“... nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The ...”

“... minister has recorded Eurozone negotiations on a smartphone – all of this, on a charitable reading, was not self-promotion but an attempt to put pressure on the Eurogroup by influencing a European public which, alas, at this stage in its linguistic and cultural fragmentation, simply doesn’t exist. Varoufakis’s style was a break with the EU’s ...”

“... and flat, Vulcan-like affect, usually tops the list. Last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told an audience that in the current economy people ‘who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage’ because they’re more likely to fall prey to caution, complacency and the conventional wisdom of the crowd. It​ isn’t ...”

“... interest, the fact is that they seldom, if ever, reach a conclusion about it. As Nye points out, Peter Trubowitz’s exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national interest throughout the 20th century concluded that ‘there is no single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should ...”

“... abstraction. It slots him into a ‘cookie-cutter modernist narrative of marching styles’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But the appearance of relentless progress in Mondrian’s art sometimes disguised uncertain forward leaps and backtrackings, like the careful deletions and proof marks he made on the letters he wrote in English. His reinventions involved ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she was free to immerse herself in reading the great Russian novels and writing a book of her own, a series of sardonic brief lives of her husband’s brothers and their spouses. She had as many visitors and invitations as she could wish, because she was immensely popular – and with people of ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... sensitive issue of childcare decision-making in Scotland and upheld the convicted drugs offender Peter Welch’s claim that the confiscation order of £59,914 imposed on him violated his rights under the Convention. In March 1994 the AlFayed brothers took a legal team of six to argue (unsuccessfully) that the DTI report into the House of Fraser had infringed ...”

“... for it: wit, taste, social grace, quickness with languages. She read books. He seldom mentions reading anything but plays and newspapers. The one thing he had of his own which she could not match was his talent. To undo his fraud and become a real hero for her, he made himself a great actor. That was what drove them apart. On the most basic level, he tells ...”

“... stretched out naked on her bed upstairs during a bibulous evening with the Styrons, Nichols, Peter Matthiessen and the rest, Mahoney comments – with the bizarre know-nothingism of the amnesiac – that her ‘nipples were the size of Oreos’. This culminating image of the post-prandial, brown-nippled Hellman – comatose, alone, exposed and snuffly ...”

“... would know what it was to engage with them and the kind of problem Frege was trying to solve. From reading Sluga’s book, he would gain only the haziest impression of Frege’s thought, and would miss entirely any feel for what it is like to try to grapple with those problems with the rigour and exactitude for which Frege is celebrated but for which Sluga ...”